The Conquest of Fear | Page 4

fears
peculiar to them, but to a world of individuals suffering, or about to
suffer, from the collapse of world-wide materialism. In this day of
chaos and uncertainty, here is the modern version of the parable of the
man who built his house upon a rock instead of on the sand: "and the

rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat
upon that house; and it fell not for it was founded upon a rock."
H. C. L.
CHAPTER I
FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE

I
When I say that during most of my conscious life I have been a prey to
fears I take it for granted that I am expressing the case of the majority
of people. I cannot remember the time when a dread of one kind or
another was not in the air. In childhood it was the fear of going to bed,
of that mysterious time when regular life was still going on downstairs,
while I was buried alive under sheets and blankets. Later it was the fear
of school, the first contact of the tender little soul with life's crudeness.
Later still there was the experience which all of us know of waking in
the morning with a feeling of dismay at what we have to do on getting
up; the obvious duties in which perhaps we have grown stale; the things
we have neglected; those in which we have made mistakes; those as to
which we have wilfully done wrong; those which weary or bore or
annoy or discourage us. Sometimes there are more serious things still:
bereavements, or frightfully adverse conditions, or hardships we never
expected brought on us by someone else.
It is unnecessary to catalogue these situations, since we all at times in
our lives have to face them daily. Fear dogs one of us in one way and
another in another, but everyone in some way.
Look at the people you run up against in the course of a few hours.
Everyone is living or working in fear. The mother is afraid for her
children. The father is afraid for his business. The clerk is afraid for his
job. The worker is afraid of his boss or his competitor. There is hardly a
man who is not afraid that some other man will do him a bad turn.

There is hardly a woman who is not afraid that things she craves may
be denied her, or that what she loves may be snatched away. There is
not a home or an office or a factory or a school or a church in which
some hang-dog apprehension is not eating at the hearts of the men,
women, and children who go in and out. I am ready to guess that all the
miseries wrought by sin and sickness put together would not equal
those we bring on ourselves by the means which perhaps we do least to
counteract. We are not sick all the time; we are not sinning all the time;
but all the time all of us--or practically all of us--are afraid of someone
or something. If, therefore, one has the feeblest contribution to make to
the defeat of such a foe it becomes difficult to withhold it.

II
But even with a view to conquering fear I should not presume to offer
to others ideas worked out purely for myself had I not been so invited. I
do not affirm that I have conquered fear, but only that in self-defence I
have been obliged to do something in that direction. I take it for granted
that what goes in that direction will go all the way if pursued with
perseverance and good will. Having thus made some simple
experiments--chiefly mental--with what to me are effective results, I
can hardly refuse to tell what they have been when others are so good
as to ask me.
And in making this attempt I must write from my own experience. No
other method would be worth while. The mere exposition of a thesis
would have little or no value. It is a case in which nothing can be
helpful to others which has not been demonstrated for oneself, even
though the demonstration be but partial.
In writing from my own experience I must ask the reader's pardon if I
seem egoistic or autobiographical. Without taking oneself too smugly
or too seriously one finds it the only way of reproducing the thing that
has happened in one's own life and which one actually knows.
And when I speak above of ideas worked out purely for myself I do not,

of course, mean that these ideas are original with me. All I have done
has been to put ideas through the mill of my own mind, co-ordinating
them to suit